From the architect. This is the renovation, located in the western Tokyo residential area. We had to adjust the boundary, from the greenbelt to the living space configured with territory of the layer, tracing in the city of configuration with some of the territory of the layer.
Providing the Engawa, breaking the high fence, planting trees in the garden. Windows and the balcony renovated, to feel the greenbelt. Privateroom was in space that can adjust the sense of openness, by joinery that put the glass to the existing foundation. We want to be the space with depth, by placing them in the boundary layer.
You’re reading 4 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Energy (Without Caffeine), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Have you ever experienced a brain cramp after a long day?
It’s that ache that begins to saturate your forehead and pool into your temples. It’s our brain telling us to slow down, because it’s no longer being productive.
Today, everyone is constantly throwing more tasks and information at us, and it’s impossible to deal with it all. Our modern day solution is to resort to consuming caffeine or simply toughening up and persisting to increase productivity. It doesn’t have to be this way!
Throughout much of the 20th century, scientists disregarded the idea that our brains might be productive during rest.
It wasn’t until 1929, that German neurologist Hans Berger disproved this notion using an electroencephalogram (device that measures brain impulses) to propose that the brain is in constant activity.
What does this mean?
Our brain consolidates recently accumulated information, and essentially rehearses recently learned skills. Most of us have observed how, after a good night’s sleep, the vocab words we struggled to remember the previous day suddenly leap into our minds or that technically challenging piano song is much easier to play. Dozens of studieshave confirmed that memory depends on sleep.
We’ve all wanted to squeeze in that extra few hours of learning in the day, despite how tired we feel. These studiesshow that you’ll be much more productive resting your brain and picking it up again when you’re fresh!
So what are some of the best ways to rest your brain?
The skill of not thinking is one that is easier said than done.
Our brains are wired to constantly be thinking, that it feels strange to simply shutting of our thoughts. In fact, the average individual has over 60,000 thoughts a day!
This is where meditation comes in.
For decades now, meditating has been the go to practice for stress relief.
The endless benefits of meditation includes: increased attention span, improving brain function, better quality of sleep, and more.
Meditation does not necessarily mean sitting cross-legged in a pitch black room with your eyes closed (although it could). Depending on your personality, meditation could mean a mantra you say to yourself, a relaxing breakfast where you savor each bite, or it could even mean taking a nice, long hike. Here are the several unique ways to meditate, depending on your personality.
Priming is another powerful method that can help you feel more energy by changing your physical state, boost brain power, and preparing your mind to increase productivity in the morning.
If forcing yourself not to think seems impossible, then priming may be for you.
Here is the method that Tony Robbins advocates:
The first thing you should do is change your physical state. This could mean hopping into a cold shower, doing a few jumping jacks, or deep breathing for 30 seconds. If you want to learn the full method of breathing that Tony preaches, click here to listen.
From there, you:
#1. Sit up on your bed or chair and close your eyes.
#2. Think of three things that you’re grateful for, spending one minute thinking of each (3 minutes)
Ask yourself questions like:
#3. Think of three things that you envision yourself creating in your life. Focus on the future, but state it as if you have already achieved it.
It could be:
Sleep deprivation is a big deal, and even a norm in our society.
A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity. When we’re working at high intensity for more than 90 minutes, we begin to rely on stress hormones — adrenalin, noradrenalin and cortisol — to keep us going. In the process, we move from parasympathetic to asympathetic arousal — a physiological state more commonly known as “fight or flight.”
This doesn’t have to mean sleeping 10 hours a day, instead of your normal 8.
By taking strategic naps during the day, you can revitalize your mind and give your brain the rest it needs to increase productivity.
When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed higher on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60 to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
In addition to strategic naps, a tactic that is shared by Buffer is called the Pomodoro Technique.
Here’s how it works:
This means 25 minutes of distraction-free work — without Facebook, phone notifications, or multi-tasking! Just one task only.
If you’re serious about testing out the Pomodoro Technique, here are the tools required to get started:
How many Pomodoro’s should you go through per day?
One of the writers at Buffer experimented this on himself, and found that he only needed 40 Pomodoro’s in order to get all of his weekly tasks done.
Keep in mind, this will depend on each individual and you should adjust everything shared according to your own preference. This could mean working in 40 minute spurts instead of 25, or taking 10 minutes off instead of 5. Go nuts!
No matter what we’re doing, we weren’t meant to go at it alone.
Whether it’s a friend, family, partner, or coach, building a support team of positive people around you is one of the most effective ways to rest your brain and maintain your health.
For high-level executives, this could mean working with a business coach to help them make better decisions.
For business owners, this could mean outsourcing tasks that you hate doing, that will give you the time and headspace to focus on what you love doing.
For language learners, this could mean working with a language coach, to save you the wasted time that comes with learning on your own, and keeping you accountable.
Going at it alone can be the biggest stressor and detriment for many of us.
Build yourself a pond, then a lake, and soon you will have an ocean.
Which of these tips was your favorite to increase productivity?
What is your experience with burning out and lacking rest?
Share with us below!
p.s – if you enjoyed this, you’ll also enjoy reading How to Find More Time In Your Schedule to Learn Something New, and 7 Research-Backed Ways to Stop Procrastinating (And Get More Done)
This article was originally posted on Rype.
You’ve read 4 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Energy (Without Caffeine), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
US firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects has completed an academic facility on the Berkeley campus in California that is topped with an expansive, overhanging canopy made up of solar cells (+ slideshow). (more…)
“Here is the repulsant snozzcumber!” cried the BFG, waving it about. “I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But because I is refusing to gobble up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead!”
— from Roald Dahl’s The BFG
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously claimed that the interests of reason combine in three questions, one of which is “What may I hope?” . . . His solution: We may hope for the ultimate good, the summum bonum — happiness in proportion to virtue.
— from Jacob M. Held’s “On Getting Our Just Desserts: Willy Wonka, Immanuel Kant and the Summum Bonum,” collected in Roald Dahl and Philosophy
Roald Dahl was born a hundred years ago this week — on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Wales (now part of Cardiff). Dahl’s Norwegian parents were not involved with it directly, but coal mining dominated South Wales, the hardships of the pit the only option for many of Dahl’s contemporaries. The dark vein that runs through many of his tales for children reflects, in part, his observation that life sometimes offers only snozzcumber to those who deserve chocolate.
But Dahl’s dark streak has other roots. Dahl dedicated The BFG to his daughter, Olivia, who died from measles in 1962, aged seven. Two years earlier, his infant son was severely injured when hit by a New York taxicab; three years later his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a series of cerebral aneurysms that put her in a coma, leading to years of rehabilitation. Dahl’s older sister died of appendicitis when he was just a three-year-old, and then weeks later his father died of pneumonia. In his biography Storyteller, Donald Sturrock reads Dahl’s first adult novel, Sometime Never (1948), as a reflection of the psychological scars that resulted from his WWII service in the RAF and perhaps triggered his career as a writer. The story is a nuclear holocaust fable; the protagonist is a pilot who loved to fly but whose only recourse now, says Sturrock, is flight of fancy:
His reasonable exterior disguises “a black despair, a deep and certain fatalism which made him impatient with the great importance which all men attached to their own individual lives.” . . . And this despair, this loss of rapture and fantasy, will remain uncured. “A solemn person, whose quick and distant eyes told of a mind behind the eyes which travelled often in remote outlandish places far away.”
The pilot is killed suddenly, by the bomb that launches World War Three. Dahl himself built a writing hut at the bottom of his garden and moved on to children’s stories, devising the remote, outlandish places that have charmed the world — his books translated into sixty languages, his grateful readers leaving toys and notes on his grave in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
Dahl may or may not be “the world’s number one storyteller” (his website), or the “greatest storyteller of all time” (his publisher), but he is ample proof for the thesis behind Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Gottschall’s book discusses new developments in the sciences and humanities that shed light on “the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.” He explores “the deep patterns in the happy mayhem of children’s make-believe and what they reveal about story’s prehistoric origins.” He analyzes how fiction “powerfully modifies culture and history,” how our brains impose narrative structure on our daily lives and provide us with “the psychotically creative night stories we call dreams.” And he offers this warning about the empty-calorie fictional foods that surround us today:
[I]t could be that an intense greed for story was healthy for our ancestors but has some harmful consequences in a world where books, MP3 players, TVs, and iPhones make story omnipresent — and where we have, in romance novels and television shows like Jersey Shore, something like the story equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I think the literary scholar Brian Boyd [On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction] is right to wonder if overconsuming in a world awash with junk story could lead to something like a “mental diabetes epidemic.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2cmfCdk
From the architect. Working in the context of the renewal of a derelict urban heritage property, the approach to this project began with considerations of typology, density and affordability. Key to this was the appropriate adaptation of a Federation-style cottage into a home for two musicians that allowed for future flexibility, and that made the most of its constraints both of site and budget. The result is the transformation of a derelict property into an open, light-filled home for two musicians.
The starting point was a dilapidated, water-damaged house containing a warren of dark and uninhabitable rooms. The rear portion was demolished to provide a series of open living spaces in its place.
Located in an area undergoing rapid renewal, the design takes advantage of the detached cottage typology. The narrow side alley, common to this type but often neglected, offered an opportunity to extend the living area to create a lightwell and wall garden, allowing light to penetrate deep within the centre of the house.
The route through the house was conceived as a journey of changing light, colour and materiality. Original Federation interiors have been restored in crisp white, whilst new elements are introduced in a restrained palette of dark timber, steel and porcelain. A contrast of light and dark materiality is used to knit together old and new.
This duality continues in various material combinations. In the kitchen, natural materials are contrasted with the manufactured; such as French-polished timber veneers in combination with crisp, large-format porcelain sheets.
In the living room, bespoke joinery exploits the depth of recycled brick walls, creating pockets of storage along the edges of the tightly constrained site. Flush finishes form continuous planes from inside to out, creating one large living space that expands to fill the outdoor side alley.
These new living spaces are open to the outdoors, yet tempered from the strong northern sun by the depth of a black steel awning, detailed so that it appears to float over the rear timber deck. In a minimal and modern interpretation of a traditional verandah, its glossy surface reflects the garden into the house.
The dialogue between old and new continues by contrasting the roughness of aged, dry pressed recycled bricks, with glossy black steel. It is a project united by contrast – rustic and slick, thin yet massive, dark and bright.
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On the 15th anniversary of 9/11 yesterday, the skylights at Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus at the World Trade Center opened for the first time, allowing light to fill the massive space as a memorial to the attacks on the twin towers. Following the masterplan laid out by Daniel Libeskind, Calatrava’s design used the angle of light as a guiding principle for orienting the transportation hub – so that at precisely 10:28 am each September 11th (the time of the collapse of the North Tower), a beam of light would pass through the opening in the roof and project all the way down the center of the Oculus floor.
A placard at the Oculus for the event explained:
On 9/11 each year, weather permitting, the skylight of the Oculus will be opened to allow the sun to fill this entire space.
Envisioned by Santiago Calatrava to symbolize a dove released from a child’s hand, the Oculus is situated at an angle in contrast to neighboring buildings and even the entire grid of the city, thereby allowing the light to shine directly overhead and for the sun to move across its axis exactly on September 11th each year.
On this 15th anniversary, we remember the innocent lives lost and celebrate the acts of selflessness and courage by so many. Please join us in remembrance of the victims and heroes of 9/11.
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The roof remained open for the day’s events, giving visitors a framed view of One World Trade Center, serving as a symbol of the city’s strength to recover and rebuild from the tragic day.
Sig Nordal 